Sam Shepard

After a year of agricultural studies in college, Shepard joined the Bishop's Company Repertory Players, a touring theater group with which he spent 1962 and 1963. In 1963 he moved to New York City to pursue his theatrical interests. His earliest attempts at playwriting, a rapid succession of one-act plays, found a receptive audience in Off-Off-Broadway productions. In 1965 he presented “Up to Thursday” and “4-H Club” at Theater 65, “Dog” and “Rocking Chair” at La Mama, “Chicago” at Genesis, and “Icarus's Mother” at the Cino.
In the 1970's, Shepard began to write rock 'n' roll plays. His major rock play was “The Tooth of Crime” (1972), in which the world of music was organized like crime syndicates, with rock stars fighting "style" wars. In 1973 his first book of essays and poems “Hawk Moon” was published. In late 1974 he became playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, a position he held from 1974 to 1984 and where most of his plays over the next decade were first produced.
Shepard’s works of the mid-1970s showed a heightening of earlier techniques and themes. In his play “Killer’s Head” (produced in 1975) the rambling monologue, a Shepard stock-in-trade, blends horror and banality in a murderer’s last thoughts before electrocution. He took a new dramatic turn into the genre of domestic realism with “Curse of the Starving Class” (1976), in which he began to explore the twin subjects of heredity and family conflict.
In 1978 Shepard began his career as a film actor, appearing in “Renaldo and Clara” and “Days of Heaven. ” He also started his collaboration with Joseph Chaikin on the theater piece “Tongues. ” He continued to write plays, including “Seduced” in 1979. His play “True West” had a run of over 600 performances in New York in 1980-1981.
He appeared in “Resurrection” (1980), “Raggedy Man” (1981), “Frances” (1982), “The Right Stuff” (1983), and “Country” (1984). He also wrote the script for “Fool for Love” in 1985.
His play “A Lie of the Mind” (1985) was a synthesis of themes from all Shepard's family plays: the love-hate relationship between men and women, the family as a source of pain yet also comfort, and America as a land of both promise and spiritual starvation. In 1987 the one-act “True Dylan” was published in Esquire magazine. At the same time he was expanding his work in film, not only writing screenplays but taking on more acting roles. Shepard continued to demonstrate his rich multi-dimensional talents during the 1990s. He appeared in screen adaptations of different novels, including “The Pelican Brief” (1993), “Snow Falling on Cedars” (1999), “All the Pretty Horses” (2000), and “The Notebook” (2004).
Among Shepard’s later films were “The Assassination of Jesse James” by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and “Blackthorn” (2011), in which he portrayed the American outlaws Frank James and Butch Cassidy, respectively. He portrayed the hard-bitten uncle of a pair of down-and-out brothers (played by Casey Affleck and Christian Bale) in the violent small-town drama “Out of the Furnace” (2013) and a father whose suicide precipitates a family crisis in “August: Osage County” (2013), an adaptation of the play by Tracy Letts. Shepard was lauded for his grim turn as a man whose son is killed during a burglary in the darkly comic thriller “Cold in July” (2014). In 2016 he appeared in the drama “In Dubious Battle”, which was based on a John Steinbeck novel about striking farmworkers.

Fifteen One-Act Plays (Vintage Contemporaries)

(Filled with wry, dark humor, unparalleled imagination, un...)

Filled with wry, dark humor, unparalleled imagination, unforgettable characters, and exquisitely crafted storytelling, Sam Shepards plays have earned him enormous acclaim over the past five decades. In these fifteen one-acts, we see him at his best, displaying his trademark ability to portray human relationships, love, and lust with rare authenticity. These fifteen furiously energetic plays confirm Shepard's status as our most audacious living playwright, unafraid to set genres and archetypes spinning with results that are utterly mesmerizing. Included in this volume:
Ages of the Moon
Evanescence; Shakespeare in the Alley
Short Life of Trouble
The Unseen Hand
The Rock Garden
Chicago
Icaruss Mother
4H Club
Fourteen Hundred Thousand
Red Cross
Cowboys #2
Forensic & The Navigators
The Holy Ghostly
Back Bog Beast Bait
Killers Head

Brilliant, prolific, uniquely American, Pulitzer prizewinning playwright Sam Separd is a major voice in contemporary theatre. And here are seven of his very best.
"One of the most original, prolific and gifted dramatists at work today."The New Yorker
"The greatest American playwright of his generation...the most inventive in language and revolutionary in craft, he is the writer whose work most accurately maps the interior and exterior landscapes of his society."New York Magazine
"If plays were put in time capsules, future generations would get a sharp-toothed profile of life in the U.S. in the past decade and a half from the works of Sam Shepard."Time
"Sam Shepard is the most exciting presence in the movie world and one of the most gifted writers ever to work on the American stage."Marsha Norman, Pulitzer prizewinning author of Night, Mother.
"One of our best and most challenging playwrights...his plays are a form of exorcism: magical, sometimes surreal rituals that grapple with the demonic forces in the American landscape."Newsweek
"His plays are stunning in thier originality, defiant and inscrutable."Esquire
"Sam Shepard is phenomenal..the best practicing American playwright."The New Republic

Day out of Days: Stories

(
From one of our most admired writers: a collection of s...)

From one of our most admired writers: a collection of stories set mainly in the fertile imaginative landscape of the American West, written with the terse lyricism, cinematic detail, and wry humor that have become Sam Shepards trademarks.
A man traveling down Highway 90 West gets trapped alone overnight inside a Cracker Barrel restaurant, where he is tormented by an endless loop of Shania Twain songs on the overhead sound system. A wandering actor returns to his hometown against his better instincts and runs into an old friend, who recounts their teenage days of stealing cars, scoring Benzedrine, and sleeping with whores in Tijuana. A Minnesota family travels south for a winter vacation but, caught up in the ordinary tyrannies of family life, remains oblivious to the beauty of the Yucatán Peninsula. A solitary horse rancher muses on Sitting Bull and Beckett amid the jumble of stuff in his big country kitchenfrom rusted spurs and Lakota dream-catchers to yellowing pictures of hawks and galloping horses to snapshots of different sons in different shirts doing different things like fishing, riding mules and tractors; leaning up against their different mothers at radical angles.
Made up of short narratives, lyrics, and dialogues, Day out of Days sets conversation against tale, song against memory, in a cubistic counterpoint that finally links each piece together. The result is a stunning work of vision and clarity imbued with the vivid reverberations of mythShepard at his flinty-eyed, unwavering best.

True West

(Comedy / 3m, 1f / Int. Recently revived at New York's Cir...)

Comedy / 3m, 1f / Int. Recently revived at New York's Circle in the Square, where Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternated playing the roles of the brothers, this American classic explores alternatives that might spring from the demented terrain of the California landscape. Sons of a desert dwelling alcoholic and a suburban wanderer clash over a film script. Austin, the achiever, is working on a script he has sold to producer Sal Kimmer when Lee, a demented petty thief, drops in. He pitches his own idea for a movie to Kimmer, who then wants Austin to junk his bleak, modern love story and write Lee's trashy Western tale. "Shepard's masterwork.... It tells us a truth, as glimpsed by a 37 year old genius." - New York Post "It's clear, funny, naturalistic. It's also opaque, terrifying, surrealistic. If that sounds contradictory, you're on to one aspect of Shepard's winning genius; the ability to make you think you're watching one thing while at the same time he's presenting another." - San Francisco Chronicle

Fool for Love and Other Plays

(Here are eight of Pulitzer-prizewinning Sam Shepard's mos...)

Here are eight of Pulitzer-prizewinning Sam Shepard's most stunning plays. This brilliant American dramatist creates what The New Yorker dubbed "Shepard Country"--a landscape of the imagination, a unique theatrical experience that captures our culture and consciouness, our fears and fantasies.
FOOL FOR LOVE * ANGEL CITY * GEOGRAPHY OF A HORSE DREAMER * ACTION * COWBOY MOUTH * MELODRAMA PLAY * SEDUCED * SUICIDE IN Bb
With an Introduction by Ross Wetzsteon
Sam Shepard is phenomenal...the best practicing American playwright. The New Republic
Sam Shepard is the most exciting presence in the movie world and one of the most gifted writers ever to work on the American stage. Marsha Norman
The most ruthlessly experimental and uncompromising of today's young writers. John Lahr
Sam Shepard fills the role of professional playwright as a good ballet dancer or acrobat fulfills his role in performance. That is, he always delivers, he executes feats of dexterity and technical difficulty that an untrained person could not, and makes them seem easy. Michael Feingold, The Village Voice
"One of the most original, prolific, and gifted dramatists at work today. The New Yorker
Increasingly recognized as one of the more significant dramatists in the English-speaking world. Charles R. Bachman, Modern Drama

Hawk Moon: Short Stories, Poems, and Monologues (PAJ Books)

(
In this collection of more than fifty monologues, short...)

In this collection of more than fifty monologues, short stories and poemsShepard's firstone of America's most acclaimed writers and actors reflects on growing up in America, rock and roll, the sex of fishes, and other topics. Shepard displays his virtuosic sense of the rhythms of the American landscape.

Sam Shepard: A Life

("John Winters offers a master class in literary sleuthing...)

"John Winters offers a master class in literary sleuthing, untangling the many lives and unearthing the origin story of Americas foremost Renaissance man of letters." ?Kelly Horan, coauthor of Devotion and Defiance
With more than fifty-five plays to his credit?including the 1979 Pulitzer Prizewinning Buried Child, an Oscar nod for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, and an onscreen persona thats been aptly summed up as Gary Cooper in denim?Sam Shepards impact on American theater and film ranks with the greatest playwrights and actors of the past half-century.
Sam Shepard: A Life gets to the heart of Sam Shepard, presenting a compelling and comprehensive account of his life and work.
In a new epilogue, added by the author after Shepards untimely death in July of 2017, John J. Winters offers a glimpse into the enigmatic authors last days, when very few knew he was suffering from ALS.
"An excellent biography . . . Mr. Winters is especially good on the backstage of one of Mr. Shepards most frequently revived works, True West . . . Mr. Winters has an interesting story to tell, and he recounts it ably, bringing us close to a figure who, he admits, avoids intimacy." ?The Wall Street Journal
"A new, thoroughly researched biography . . . Winters does indeed capture a personality more anxious and self-doubting than previous biographers have grasped." ?The Washington Post
"Meticulously presents the facts of Shepards complex life along with incisive descriptions and analyses of diverse productions of Shepards demanding and innovative plays . . . Winters portrays Shepard as a magnetic, enigmatic, and multitalented artist drawing on a deep well of loneliness and self-questioning, keen attunement to the zeitgeist, and penetrating insight into human nature." ?Booklist (starred review)

Motel Chronicles

(
Motel Chronicles reveals the fast-moving and sometimes ...)

Motel Chronicles reveals the fast-moving and sometimes surprising world of the man behind the plays that have made Sam Shepard a live legend in the theater. Shepard chronicles his own life birth in Illinois, childhood memories of Guam, Pasadena and rural Southern California, adventures as ranch hand, waiter, rock musician, dramatist, and film actor. Scenes from this book form the basis of his play Superstitions, and of the film (directed by Wim Wenders) Paris, Texas, winner of the Golden Palm Award at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.
". . .essential reading. A scrapbook of short stories, autobiographical reveries, poetry and photographs, Motel Chronicles is full of verbal delights, as well as insights into its author's entire canon. Whether Mr. Shepard is reminiscing about his parents or daydreaming about cherished movies and cars of his youth, he speaks in pungent and ethereal language that remakes our West. Read in conjunction with the plays, Motel Chronicles also helps demystify the origins of Mr. Shepard's psychological obsessions and desolate frontier iconography." Frank Rich, New York Times
"If plays were put in time capsules, future generations would get a sharp-toothed profile of life in the U.S. in the past decade and half from the works of Sam Shepard." Time
"Sam Shepard is a shamana New World shaman. Sam is as American as peyote, magic mushrooms, Rock and Roll, and medicine bundles." Jack Gelber
Sam Shepard (1943) is a playwright, actor, author, screen writer, and director whose work is performed on and off Broadway and in other theaters across the country. In 1979, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Buried Child. In 1983, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in The Right Stuff. His other famous works include True West, A Lie of the Mind, and Curse of the Starving Class. Fool For Love & the Sad Lament of Pecos Bill by Sam Shepard was also published by City Lights Publishers.

The One Inside

(The first work of long fiction from the Pulitzer Prize-wi...)

The first work of long fiction from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrighta tour de force of memory, mystery, death, and life.
This searing, extraordinarily evocative narrative opens with a man in his house at dawn, surrounded by aspens, coyotes cackling in the distance as he quietly navigates the distance between present and past. More and more, memory is overtaking him: in his mind he sees himself in a movie-set trailer, his young face staring back at him in a mirror surrounded by light bulbs. In his dreams and in visions he sees his late fathersometimes in miniature, sometimes flying planes, sometimes at war. By turns, he sees the bygone America of his childhood: the farmland and the feedlots, the railyards and the dinersand, most hauntingly, his father's young girlfriend, with whom he also became involved, setting into motion a tragedy that has stayed with him. His complex interiority is filtered through views of mountains and deserts as he drives across the country, propelled by jazz, benzedrine, rock and roll, and a restlessness born out of exile. The rhythms of theater, the language of poetry, and a flinty humor combine in this stunning meditation on the nature of experience, at once celebratory, surreal, poignant, and unforgettable.

Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark (Southwestern Writers Collection)

(
Sam Shepard was arguably Americas finest working drama...)

Sam Shepard was arguably Americas finest working dramatist, as well as an accomplished screenwriter, actor, and director. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, he wrote more than forty-five plays, including True West, Fool for Love, and Buried Child. Shepard also appeared in more than fifty films, beginning with Terrence Malicks Days of Heaven, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Right Stuff. Despite the publicity his work and life attracted, however, Shepard remained a strongly private man who said many times that he would never write a memoir. But he did write intensively about his inner life and creative work to his former father-in-law and housemate, Johnny Dark, who was Shepards closest friend, surrogate brother (they were nearly the same age), and even artistic muse.
Two Prospectors gathers nearly forty years of correspondence and transcribed conversations between Shepard and Dark. In these gripping, sometimes gut-wrenching letters, the men open themselves to each other with amazing honesty. Shepards letters give us the deepest look we will ever get into his personal philosophy and creative process, while in Darks letters we discover insights into Shepards character that only an intimate friend could provide. The writers also reflect on the books and authors that stimulate their thinking, their relationships with women (including Shepards anguished decision to leave his wife and sonDarks stepdaughter and grandsonfor actress Jessica Lange), personal struggles, and accumulating years. Illustrated with Darks candid, revealing photographs of Shepard and their mutual family across many years, as well as facsimiles of numerous letters, Two Prospectors is a compelling portrait of a complex friendship that anchored both lives for decades, a friendship also poignantly captured in Treva Wurmfelds film, Shepard & Dark.

Buried Child - Acting Edition

(A newly revised edition of an American classic, Sam Shepa...)

A newly revised edition of an American classic, Sam Shepards Pulitzer Prizewinning Buried Child is as fierce and unforgettable as it was when it was first produced in 1978.
A scene of madness greets Vince and his girlfriend as they arrive at the squalid farmhouse of Vinces hard-drinking grandparents, who seem to have no idea who he is. Nor does his father, Tilden, a hulking former All-American footballer, or his uncle, who has lost one of his legs to a chain saw. Only the memory of an unwanted child, buried in an undisclosed location, can hope to deliver this family from its sin.

People Also Searched For

Sam Shepard was an American playwright and actor whose plays blend images of the American West, Pop motifs, science fiction, and other elements of popular and youth culture.

Background

Samuel Shepard was born on November 5, 1943 in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. He was the son of a career Army man whose assignments took him to many locations, including Guam, while his son was growing up.

After his father retired from the service, the family settled on a ranch in Duarte, California, where they grew avocados and raised sheep.

Education

Shepard attended Duarte High School, California. Upon graduation, he studied at Mount Antonio Junior College for a year, majoring in agriculture with some thought of becoming a veterinarian.

Career

After a year of agricultural studies in college, Shepard joined the Bishop's Company Repertory Players, a touring theater group with which he spent 1962 and 1963. In 1963 he moved to New York City to pursue his theatrical interests. His earliest attempts at playwriting, a rapid succession of one-act plays, found a receptive audience in Off-Off-Broadway productions. In 1965 he presented “Up to Thursday” and “4-H Club” at Theater 65, “Dog” and “Rocking Chair” at La Mama, “Chicago” at Genesis, and “Icarus's Mother” at the Cino.

In the 1970's, Shepard began to write rock 'n' roll plays. His major rock play was “The Tooth of Crime” (1972), in which the world of music was organized like crime syndicates, with rock stars fighting "style" wars. In 1973 his first book of essays and poems “Hawk Moon” was published. In late 1974 he became playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, a position he held from 1974 to 1984 and where most of his plays over the next decade were first produced.

Shepard’s works of the mid-1970s showed a heightening of earlier techniques and themes. In his play “Killer’s Head” (produced in 1975) the rambling monologue, a Shepard stock-in-trade, blends horror and banality in a murderer’s last thoughts before electrocution. He took a new dramatic turn into the genre of domestic realism with “Curse of the Starving Class” (1976), in which he began to explore the twin subjects of heredity and family conflict.

In 1978 Shepard began his career as a film actor, appearing in “Renaldo and Clara” and “Days of Heaven. ” He also started his collaboration with Joseph Chaikin on the theater piece “Tongues. ” He continued to write plays, including “Seduced” in 1979. His play “True West” had a run of over 600 performances in New York in 1980-1981.

He appeared in “Resurrection” (1980), “Raggedy Man” (1981), “Frances” (1982), “The Right Stuff” (1983), and “Country” (1984). He also wrote the script for “Fool for Love” in 1985.

His play “A Lie of the Mind” (1985) was a synthesis of themes from all Shepard's family plays: the love-hate relationship between men and women, the family as a source of pain yet also comfort, and America as a land of both promise and spiritual starvation. In 1987 the one-act “True Dylan” was published in Esquire magazine. At the same time he was expanding his work in film, not only writing screenplays but taking on more acting roles. Shepard continued to demonstrate his rich multi-dimensional talents during the 1990s. He appeared in screen adaptations of different novels, including “The Pelican Brief” (1993), “Snow Falling on Cedars” (1999), “All the Pretty Horses” (2000), and “The Notebook” (2004).

Among Shepard’s later films were “The Assassination of Jesse James” by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and “Blackthorn” (2011), in which he portrayed the American outlaws Frank James and Butch Cassidy, respectively. He portrayed the hard-bitten uncle of a pair of down-and-out brothers (played by Casey Affleck and Christian Bale) in the violent small-town drama “Out of the Furnace” (2013) and a father whose suicide precipitates a family crisis in “August: Osage County” (2013), an adaptation of the play by Tracy Letts. Shepard was lauded for his grim turn as a man whose son is killed during a burglary in the darkly comic thriller “Cold in July” (2014). In 2016 he appeared in the drama “In Dubious Battle”, which was based on a John Steinbeck novel about striking farmworkers.

Achievements

In the 1965-66 season Shepard won Obie Awards for his plays “Chicago”, “Icarus’s Mother”, and “Red Cross. ” He also received two more grants, one from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1967 and one from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1968.

He wrote 44 plays, several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs. He was awarded a second Guggenheim in 1971. When his "The Tooth of Crime", widely acclaimed in England, was presented in the United States, it won an Obie in 1973.

He was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of jet pilot Chuck Yeager in "The Right Stuff. "

He achieved his greatest success with "Paris, Texas", which was given a Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984. His “Fool for Love” won him his 11th Obie in 1984 and his “A Lie of the Mind” garnered the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1986. In 1992 he was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Drama.

Personality

“David Richards: "Shepard delivers a requiem for America, land of the surreal and home of the crazed . .. the amber waves of grain mask a dark secret. "

Richard Gilman: "Not many critics would dispute the proposition that Sam Shepard is our most interesting and exciting playwright. "”

Connections

In 1969 Shepard married the actress O-Lan Jones. They had one son, Jesse Mojo Shepard. The couple divorsed in 1984. Shepard met Jessica Lange, Academy Award-winning actress, and they were together for nearly 30 years, separated in 2009. They had two children, Hannah Jane (born 1985) and Samuel Walker Shepard (born 1987).